In many industries tool and part breakage is unfortunately a part of norm. Tools break and need to be replaced. Adding to the frustration of breakage though is when this happens in operations where replacement is difficult or excessively expensive or time consuming. Such is the case with downhole tools, for example. Breakage of tools run into the downhole environment presents not only the obvious initial problem of “the tool broke” but the ancillary problems caused by the location of the broken tool thousands of feet down the hole and that it can be exceptionally difficult to remove from the hole.
Operations on a rig used for running tools in and out of the downhole environment are very costly to undertake and while those operations are not producing a target fluid to put the operation “in the black”, they are huge financial drains for the organization running the operation.
In view of the foregoing, operators would well receive technologies that improve any of the drawbacks noted above.